Meadows / Flint The Cat Owners Handbook

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60765-377-6
Verlag: IMM Lifestyle
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

This text is designed to enable cat owners to understand their feline friend better as well as to protect it from hazards and illness, monitor its health, deal with emergencies, and cope with ageing. The book includes complementary medicine for cats and advice on feeding.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meadows, Graham

Flint, Elsa

Leseproben

CATS AND PEOPLE

Dogs have masters. Cats have staff. .

Despite their reputation for aloofness, it is not unusual for a cat to head-butt and lick its owner to show affection.

Those of us who are owned by cats may well subscribe to the theory that humans didn’t domesticate the cat at all, but that the cat domesticated itself by walking into, adapting to and (in many cases) taking over people’s lives. With few exceptions the modern domestic cat remains independent and solitary, and has an indefinable wild streak. It gives you a look that implies: ‘I may live in your household, but don’t expect me to conform.’

Male lions () within a pride can be particularly tolerant of cubs.

The origin of the domestic cat

A distant ancestor of today’s domestic cat may have been Martelli’s wild cat (), a species now extinct. It was similar in size to today’s small wild cats. About 600,000–900,000 years ago it may have given rise to , from which three distinct types evolved according to the region and environment in which they lived. These were the central European or Forest wild cat (), the Asiatic desert cat () and the African wild cat (). The latter inhabited most of Asia and North Africa, and because the process of domestication of the cat occurred mainly in the Middle East, the African wild cat was almost certainly the principal ancestor of modern domestic cats.

Domestication

For the cat, as for other domestic animals, the process of domestication occurred over a long period of time. Wild cats would have associated with humans once the latter stopped being hunter-gatherers and formed permanent settlements, grew grain crops and set up grain stores. Grain stores would have attracted mice and rats, which in turn would have attracted wild cats.

Any sensible agriculturist would quickly have seen the advantage of encouraging these cats to help control the vermin, so a loose but mutually beneficial association would have been forged.

Many statues were made of the Egyptian cat goddess Bast. This bronze figure is dated between 664 and 525BC.

Just when the process of domestication started is unclear, though, and our estimates rely on archaeological discoveries and the excavation of cat remains that can be shown to be closely associated with humans. Although various cat remains have been found in Egyptian archaeological sites dating to 6700BC, there is no firm evidence that these were domesticated animals, and they are more likely to have been wild cats. If you accept that finding a cat skeleton buried with a person is evidence that the cat was domesticated, then a 7000-year-old burial site at Mostagedda, in Egypt, is evidence enough. There, excavations revealed a man buried with two animals at his feet: a cat and a gazelle.

If this doesn’t convince you, then you need to move forward 2500 years and to the earliest depiction of cats in Egyptian tomb art. Cat remains recovered from an archaeological site in the Indus Valley, dated at 2000BC, could well be from a domesticated variety, and paintings and inscriptions from the same period portray cats in situations that suggest that they were domesticated.

Cat worship and culture

Many thousands of years ago a cat cult was well established in ancient Egypt. There was a feline goddess, Mafdet, a snake-killer and protector of the pharaoh in the royal palace, whose pictures appear in magic formulas carved on pyramid chambers of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (before 2280BC).

Cats were worshipped in ancient Egypt, and many were mummified to accompany their owners into the next world.

The ancient Egyptians recognized the cat’s role as a guardian of grain stores, protecting the animal by law and keeping sacred cats in their temples. In the temple of the cat goddess Bast or Pasht, from which the word ‘puss’ is said to have arisen, many thousands of cats were mummified and laid in tombs. Excavations at other sites have also revealed large numbers of mummified cats, and the height of the cat cult is thought to have occurred at around 500BC, when many other animals were also a subject of worship. It was once thought that all the mummies were of household cats that had died from natural causes and whose remains had been presented to the temple by their mourning owners. More recently researchers have concluded that many of them were cats specially bred for sacrifice, because they had died from a broken neck and many were merely kittens.

From that time on there is plenty of evidence to show that cats became well established in Egyptian homes. A painting at Thebes, in the tomb of the harbour-master May and his wife Tui (dated around 1600BC), portrays a ginger cat sitting beneath Tui’s chair. It wears a collar, and its leash is tied to a chair leg. The inference is that it was a pet, although this could be disputed.

A picture in the tomb of someone named Baket (dated around 1500BC) depicts a house attendant watching a cat that is eyeing a rat. Other tombs in Thebes also contain paintings of cats. One of them, dated at 1400BC, depicts a kitten sitting on the lap of the sculptor Ipuy. There are also some interesting, though inconclusive, artifacts to suggest that by this period in history cats were not only kept as pets in homes, but also used to help people to hunt. At least three tomb paintings, one of them in the tomb of the sculptor Nebuman (around 1400BC), show cats apparently participating in the action while wildfowlers are using throwing sticks to catch and kill ducks and other birds. Were these cats helping to flush out game from the reed beds and/or helping to retrieve it? A sceptic might suggest that they were simply there to take advantage of a free lunch.

Don’t be surprised to hear your mother cat purring loudly when she suckles her kittens.

The taming of the cat

It has been suggested that during the process of domestication a genetic change to wild temperament (a ‘domestication mutation’) must have occurred to reduce the wild cat’s innate aggression and make domestication possible. The basis for this reasoning is that in wild cats tameness (lack of aggression) is not inherited; although individual animals can be tamed, their kittens are born with a wild temperament and in their turn must also be tamed. In the domestic cat, kittens inherit tameness from their mother – therefore, the reasoning goes, some genetic change must have occurred in the domestic cat to cause this.

A lioness () is forever vigilant, watching for potential danger to her cubs, even when they are no longer tiny and hopelessly vulnerable.

The idea of a domestication mutation is intriguing, for its exponents suggest that when this occurs it prevents the development of certain adult behaviour patterns, with the result that adult animals still retain some juvenile behaviours. Retaining these behaviours makes them better suited to domestication.

The term for this is neotony, and it functions as follows. In the wild, adult cats are solitary. A close-knit ‘family’ group is formed when a female gives birth to and rears her kittens, but once the kittens become independent there is no continuing association, and each individual becomes a ‘loner’.

Domestic cats, on the other hand, behave rather differently. They are more gregarious, and the suggestion is that this is because they retain some of their ‘kittenish’ instinct to keep together. There are several examples to demonstrate this. If the owner of a female cat that has given birth to kittens decides to keep one or more of those kittens once they have been reared, the mother and offspring will often form close family bonds.

Even when domestic cats are feral, their families tend to stay together, while in urban areas, where there are comparatively dense domestic cat populations, unrelated adults will often form loose associations. Groups of them may even meet together at certain times of the day for ‘cat conferences’, which seem to be the cat equivalent to humans ‘hanging out’ together.

Neotony could arise from a genetic mutation, but it could also result from the process of human selection. People would choose to keep and breed the cats that were the easiest to manage. Those displaying juvenile characteristics were more family-oriented and less independent than adults, and therefore more suited to life within a human family.

Neotony is not just a characteristic of domestic cats. It occurs in domestic dogs, too, where adults retain certain puppy characteristics that make it easier to integrate them into a human family.

Whether such a genetic change occurred, and if so, when, we shall never know. We can only surmise that people kept the kittens of wild cats, and that some of these (probably females) proved tame enough to keep to adulthood and breed from. Eventually, for various reasons, kittens were born that were less aggressive and more suited to living with humans.

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